Automating eCommerce processes is an innovative way to propel your way to success. Here are five steps to get started with your marketing automation strategy.
When you do eCommerce business, you need to know that customers have expectations. It does not matter if you have a small or significant venture. Most customers today are technology-savvy which fuels their demanding nature. You need to provide them with information in the fastest and most accurate way possible. If they are going to ask questions, they expect you to give up whatever you are doing and turn your attention to them at once. If they see better products on the market, they want you to keep up or offer something more interesting.
While these scenarios may look worse, it is your duty as a marketer to meet or even rise above those expectations. Your mission should include giving them what they want without asking for it.
Looking closely at the customers’ demands, every bit of it stems from the need to be pampered. They want to feel important and acknowledged as they do business with you. Keeping them happy will make them stay and choose your brand over and over. As an eCommerce business owner, producing good quality products is challenging enough. Going all the way with your marketing efforts to connect with customers is a serious task that must also be accomplished, no matter the cost.
Thankfully, your woes can be remedied with a simple marketing automation strategy. Be warned that it would not be as “simple” as you’d want it to be. You may find it complex, but not if you have a way to know about it beforehand.
So, gear up and dive into everything you need to learn about implementing an effective marketing automation strategy for your business.
Why Automate?
The first thing you must understand about marketing automation is how it can benefit you. There are many ways that a marketing automation strategy can help a business. Some of these are:
- Increased Productivity. Often, eCommerce business owners must perform many duties in their day-to-day operations. Marketing automation software allows you to multi-tasking with the variety of features it offers. It makes all processes faster and more efficient because almost everything is powered by artificial intelligence technology. Because it relieves the employees of getting overworked, they also become more effective at doing their tasks. Injuries and strains are lessened, so their well-being is also taken care of.
- Better Communications. Whether internal or with the customers, automation ensures that communication lines are always open. Customers will not have trouble reaching out to the company when chatbots are in place. The top marketing automation tools also have collaborative features. It eliminates miscommunications that often cause problems in the workplace. It empowers sales and marketing teams, inspiring them to enhance lead nurturing efforts and plan effective targeted campaigns.
- Reduced Costs. Putting up a marketing automation strategy is a much cheaper alternative than hiring more people on your team. A graphic designer, for example, will have to be paid several hundred dollars to create your marketing assets. On the other hand, a marketing analyst can collect up to thousands of dollars to scrutinize your campaign strategies. Why should you pay for those exorbitant fees when you can have an automation tool that can do both for less than a hundred bucks per month?
- Permits Product Development. It is always encouraged to look for ways to improve products or develop new ones to offer your customers something fresh. This cannot be easy if you are burdened with more pressing tasks, like creating marketing content. Automating marketing can afford you time to be more efficient at new-product development and other research and development projects.
- Happier Customers. You can only get customers satisfied if you can meet their expectations. Marketing automation is one of the most effective strategies to realize this goal. It helps you streamline workflows to keep their customer journey as seamless as possible. It also frees up some of the most tedious tasks, allowing you more time to improve products and offer innovations. The constant personalization options aid in keeping customer communications relevant and valuable. These are just some of the advantages of marketing automation that support customer satisfaction ratings high.
Now that you know the benefits of marketing automation, it is time to learn how to start implementing it for your business.
How To Implement an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy for Your eCommerce Business
- Assess Your Business Needs Marketing automation has many benefits, but you must ensure it will benefit YOUR business. It is not a one-size-fits-all strategy that is effective in all industries. Check which areas of your business need automation so you can correctly choose the best tools to use. Try to narrow down the features you badly need and compare them with the features of the tools available to you. You may also try free marketing software to weigh your options. By knowing what you need, you will have automation software that should serve you and assist you in reaching your goals.
- Align Your Automation with Your Goals It is crucial that you set realistic goals before implementing a marketing automation strategy. If your goal is to improve the customer journey, get an automation tool to help you personalize the customer experience. To keep producing better content, you will need a content generation tool. On the other hand, a social management tool is perfect if your goal is to manage your social profiles properly.
- Implement Marketing Automation Gradually. Any strategy that promises wonders can be intimidating. Your team will be working with new technology; some may not be familiar with it. A slow approach to this process is the best way to integrate the different tools into your workflow. This is to let everyone understand how it works so that all features will be utilized to their full potential.
- Nurture Your Leads Nurturing leads can increase conversion chances but guiding prospects to the sales funnel is a long and taxing process. This step, however, is crucial as it makes them move closer to a deal. You also need your leads as the main targets of your automation strategy. Unless you have prospects, you cannot automate some processes like email marketing, landing pages, or social media.
- Focus on Customer Retainment you must retain customers after sales to grow a sustainable eCommerce business. You need to offer an excellent service to keep them coming back. Do follow-ups after their purchase, like doing a customer satisfaction survey, or you can offer products or services that they might like based on their last purchase. This is an excellent opportunity for business growth and building stronger relationships simultaneously.
Tools to Help You Automate Your Marketing Process
Whether you need someone to do the accounting, creatives, or communications, the best marketing automation software can do it all. Here are some of the top marketing automation tools for their business-boosting advantages:
1. Renderforest.com: To Automate Design and Website Creation
Animations and videos are becoming the most preferred content in marketing. This is expected since they are more effective at giving information and sending brand messages. Renderforest is a design tool that allows you to create graphics and produces stunning videos, animations, and mockups. You may also use it to design great websites to enhance your traffic.
2. Removal.AI: To Automate Image Background Removal & Editing
Removing backgrounds from images is not only challenging but also very time-consuming. Removal.AI is a nifty tool that can remove photo backgrounds in seconds. It can do batch processing, so images are ready in less time than it usually takes. Removal.AI also saves you the trouble of looking for another tool to edit photos. It has a built-in photo editor that you can use to enhance photos further or change backgrounds in a snap.
3. Designstripe.com: To Automate Design for Creative Assets (Illustrations & Mockups)
Beautiful illustrations should never be missing from your marketing assets. If you do not have the budget to hire a designer, getting DesignStripe for your creative needs is your only solution. It lets you create striking illustrations and other graphics without design skills. All you need to do is choose a template, personalize it according to your liking, and upload your illustrations. It is that simple, and it even has mock-up templates, which are perfect for creating walkthroughs and tutorials in using your products.
4. Missinglettr.com: To Automate Social Media Marketing
With Missinglettr, you can optimize your digital marketing efforts. Automate your social media content distribution to get the most out of every post and increase visibility for your eCommerce business. Create posts tailored to each platform’s unique audience and use our analytics tool to measure performance across all channels.
Our comprehensive analytics feature gives you valuable insights, including post reach, engagement rate, and top content. You can easily track the performance of your campaigns to identify what’s working and what isn’t. This way, you can adjust your strategy for maximum results. Missinglettr helps businesses take their social media strategies to the next level with automated content distribution and powerful analytics. With Missinglettr, you can easily reach your target audience and generate more leads. Get started today to see how our platform can help you grow!
5. Kittl.com: To Automate Brand & Marketing Assets Creation
It can be draining to always think of fresh designs that you can use for marketing. Kittl is an innovative way to ignite your imagination with its library that is full of stunning designs. Whether you need new graphics for social media posts or you have to create promotional posters, Kittl gives you plenty of design options. The icing on top is that these design templates are all customizable. You can use them to make branded designs for all your campaigns.
6. Vloggi.com: To Automate Video Content User Generation
An effective way to research customer experiences is by asking for video testimonials. Vloggi is a video submission tool that you can use to do this. Collect videos from your customers, and it automatically asks for consent to re-use. This makes it easier to grow a user-generated video library that you can refer to for future use.
7. Flexitive.com: To Automate Design Asset Production in Bulk
Automating omnichannel design production is an intelligent way to scale visual communications while ensuring that design quality is maintained across all channels and file formats. With Flexitive, you can centralize design production as it supports more than 40 ad servers and DSPs. You get pixel-perfect designs even if you use different platforms for your campaigns.
8. Socialbee.com: To Automate Social Media Scheduling and Content Creation
Unless your target clientele lives on a rock, you cannot avoid doing social media marketing if you want to stay relevant. Most people turn to social media for information. It is a must not to skip creating, publishing, and analyzing posts to grow your online presence. Since it is too time-consuming to do these things, a social media management tool like SocialBee is heaven-sent. By helping you manage your socials, you can cover many tasks simultaneously. Use it to schedule posts ahead, so you keep showing up on timelines. SocialBee can share content across channels if your target market uses different platforms. You can use it to get insightful data about your social media marketing performance.
9. Text Blaze: To Automate Writing Content and Snippets in Shortcut
Repetitive typing and mistakes are unavoidable if you manually answer multiple emails and comments. While it is important not to sound robotic when communicating with customers, you must also ensure that you do it smartly. TextBlaze can help improve productivity and accuracy if you want to speed up your typing. It uses “snippets” as text shortcuts, so you do not need to write the whole thing for every reply. TextBlaxe also has collaborative features so everyone can edit and improve snippets together.
10. AI-Writer.com: To Automate Content Writing
Accurate, relevant, and quality content are a must to increase your online presence. AI Writer lets you create better content fast and easily with just a headline. It is an efficient method to produce full-length article drafts that you can use as a base for posts. It uses artificial intelligence technology to generate fresh and relevant content, guaranteeing that every text is unique and original. All articles generated are also authoritative and SEO-friendly, so it can help improve your rankings.
11. Dreamdata.io: To Automate Attribution & Revenue Analysis
One of the most challenging areas of marketing is analytics. Dreamdata cuts down the time it takes to do revenue attribution. It generates an actionable analysis of your marketing performance to help you identify how to improve strategies. By giving you customer journey insights, your get to have the opportunity to make the buying experience better for every customer.
12. Bigmailer.io: To Automate Email Marketing
BigMailer.io makes managing your email campaigns quick and easy, allowing you to focus on what matters most: engaging with customers. With BigMailer’s comprehensive suite of tools, you can create attractive emails that capture your customer’s attention. All the while, its advanced automation capabilities allow for drip sequences, RSS-to-email campaigns, and more. The tool provides a unified view of your customer data so you can easily segment users and target them with personalized content. And with its real-time engagement-based targeting, you’ll always send the right message to the right people at the right time.
How Do You Automate Your Marketing Process?
A marketing automation strategy is an innovation that every modern marketer and eCommerce business owner must consider seriously implementing. It is an intelligent method that you can use to increase leads, conversions, and sales.
It opens up exciting opportunities for organizations to be more efficient using tools that simplify workflows. Companies who struggle with their finances can use it to lessen business process costs. As for improving customer experience, marketing automation can cover all tasks guiding organizations to improve the purchasing journey.